Design Matters

We just announced the latest incarnation of the flagship T series with a 15.4″ wide aspect ratio screen. This is the first true classic design ThinkPad to feature a wide screen view. Previous ventures in this space used the experimental Z series design. We’re back to classic. Aside from the screen, it’s design is pretty much the same as the current T60. Lots of reviews have already been posted on the web. Here is one of my favorites from Notebookreview.com.

Comments about this model are always welcome.

David Hill

How many notebooks are too many? In my case, I haven’t hit my limit yet, but wanted to share my home office setup, talk through some frustrations, and look at the state of the art today for multi-screen displays.

I saw my first multi-screen set up in the art department at Forbes Magazine in the 90s, where the designers would extend their primary desktop onto a small monitor sitting adjacent to the main screen. That small monitor held the tool boxes, palettes and brushes for their Adobe apps (Illustrator and PhotoShop primarily), leaving the main monitor open for nothing but image manipulation.

I was jealous. I wanted that.

Well, I have it, and I’ve used multiple screens for some time. It’s easy to do, especially if you want to supercharge your productivity at a desk and prefer to bang out long documents on a full-sized keyboard with a mouse and have a dock configuration to ease the transition from backpack to desktop set up.

That’s an X60s on the left, primarily running Lotus Notes and instant message sessions, in the middle is a Lenovo LCD where the bulk of my work occurs, and on the right, unconnected to the screen, external keyboard, or mouse, is an X41 running Ubuntu Breezy Badger and where I do most of my sysadmin work, blog reading, and web browsing.

At home I run an X60s onto a Lenovo external LCD monitor which I won in an Employee Purchase Program as a reward for selling a lot of ThinkPads to family and friends through my EPP discount (they sell themselves, but who was I to look the LCD-gift horse in the mouth?)

I plug the monitor into the UltraBase dock and then use the ThinkVantage Presentation Director to build a profile that extends my desktop off of the notebook and onto the screen. It’s a little tricky to explain, but here goes:

1. I go into the ThinkVantage Productivity Center and find the Presentation Director. This utility is worth taking some to understand on general principle. Other than the wireless network finder, it is one of my favorites in the ThinkVantage suite.

2.  The tool lets you even designate startup options such as turning on the ThinkLight, displaying a clean desktop (so audience’s won’t see your World of Warcraft icon), and even a different desktop image (so you won’t show some embarrassing photo taken at the beach during your last vacation). The coolest thing is the “test” screen that gives a preview of what the final configuration will look like.

3. I like my primary desktop to be the external monitor, carrying all the icons and controls on, with the notebook screen resolution dropped down to 800×600 for better visibility. Then I tell the Presentation Director where the screens are in relation to each other — notebook on the left or right (which is crucial because you move from one screen to the other simply by dragging the mouse in the appropriate direction), fine tune other options, and then save it with a name.

4. When I’m ready to work, I press <FN>+<F7>, bringing up the scheme selector, select the one that fits the situation, and bingo, I am off and working.

It’s not that hard to do, and it is a great way to increase screen real estate and put an unused external display to good use. When I toured Google last winter I was struck by how many developers were working on multi-screen set ups, not a surprise given an excellent article I read in the New York Times Sunday Magazine in the fall of 2005 that discussed the use of multiple screens to increase productivity. I won’t link to that, but an excellent discussion on the article and the application of multiple screens to increased productivity can be found at the 37Signals blog.

Now my next challenge is to pull my Linux notebook into the game through a Keyboard/Video/Mouse switch like this one from Avocent. I don’t know if the device can tolerate different operating systems, but I am slowly driving myself crazy when I switch to the Linux box and start moving the mouse connected to the Windows box and wonder what’s gone wrong.

Send me a photo of your multi-screen, multi-ThinkPad working environment, also any tips or insights are always appreciated.

David Churbuck

I asked for a tablet last week … and actually received one, although the machines are as hard to find right now as any we’ve ever built. I’ve followed the evolution of pen computing from the beginning of the business in the early 90s, and enjoyed Jerrold Kaplan’s account of the Go Corporation’s efforts to build a pen-PC in Startup but I’ve haven’t used a pen-based PC for an extended period of time before, and feeling a bit excited by the first wave of positive reviews, I looked forward to learning more about the tablet-paradigm and seeing if there was any reason why a technology that has been more than a decade in the building is finally finding traction in the market.

When I arrived at Lenovo in January of 2006 the hot product was the X41 Tablet. Reviewers and bloggers were falling over themselves, and some, like Jim Forbes at ForbesOnTech, were providing some valuable feedback on how to improve the next generation. When the specifications of the X60 tablet leaked out earlier this fall, the buzz built up even more, and feeling sucked in, I opened the box with the new tablet with a degree of skepticism.

(Is there anything as pure as the feeling of a new PC that hasn’t been turned on yet? That sense of possibilities? Of an install as yet unsullied by malware, viruses, and a fragmented hard disk? But I digress.)

The first application I loaded on the tablet was Microsoft OneNote; a product that in my opinion does more to bring out the power of a tablet than any other single application. I put OneNote on my college student’s Thinkpad (non-tablet) and he returned for his first holiday singing its praises.  So right off the bat, I predict a big fan base among students based on my market survey of one.

When I was a journalist I took interview notes directly on a notebook keyboard, but the noise of the keys sometimes disturbed the person I was interviewing or was outright rude in a group setting where someone was making a presentation to an audience. The pen as a note-taking device is, in my narrow opinion, the top application, however for a person working in the field on form-based applications — an insurance adjuster, a physician for example — the device is equally needed.

Anyway, back to my first attempts to use the pen. The pen, or stylus, lives inside of a niche/slot on the front of the machine. It pops out and immediately has a heft that is an improvement over the styli I’ve used in the past, which felt like cheap pens that they give away at the NoTell Motel. There is a grey button on one facet of the stylus that acts as a mouse button, and the blunt end features an “eraser” which, when applied to the screen, creates a small erasing box that can be used to delete a scrawl or word.

The payoff for me, and where I tip my hat to the designers, is the tactile feel of the business end — a replaceable red point — on the screen itself. The early reviewers praised the “paper feel” of this and I concur, it’s like Goldilocks said: “It’s just right.”

Other first impressions. The latch on the screen “reverses” to lock it down when swiveled into pen mode. There is a round “nav” button on the screen (but I haven’t quite figured that out yet), and the bezel, or edge of the tablet screen carries enough functionality — from a button that changes the orientation of the screen to landscape or page made, to an escape button that I can see staying in tablet mode without having to switch to the keyboard for an extended period of time.

Back to the actual pen stuff. My handwriting stinks. Big time. I’ve been typing since the age of nine (really bad handwriting), so I long ago gave up on cursive penmanship and now depend on a micro-printing for my untyped notes. That means I write slowly, but thankfully precisely enough that most handwriting recognition systems have an easy time with my scrawls. OneNote and the X60 Tablet were no exception. I used the tablet to take notes during conference calls and now, a week later, actually prize the fact that those scrawls are neatly tabbed and catalogued inside of OneNote and not scattered around my desk on 3×5 index cards.

Alas, I had to send the tablet to the IT department to get loaded with the Lenovo applications (including a pen version of Lotus Notes), so for the time being I’m back to the keyboard. When I get it back I will see if I can migrate my Verizon EVDO account over to it, and start doing some pen-based blogging while traveling.

I’m interested in first impressions and your main application using a tablet. Are designers using the interface for detailed image work, say in Adobe Illustrator?

David Churbuck

World Usability Day 2006

Just found out about this. 

There's a lot of great buzz building over our latest tablet PC, the X60. Early reviews are very positive and have the design team pretty excited.

Gottabemobile.com's Dennis Rice and Warner Crocker, came into the office a few weeks ago for a preview of the machine with Mike Hagarty (our Worldwide Segment Manager for the ThinkPad) and have been playing around with a review unit. They've produced a great set of videos describing their experiences with the new machine.

The first part of their review is here.

The machine is featured on the homepage of Lenovo.com this week. You can check it out here.

David will be blogging some more on some of the unique challenges involved in designing a tablet. Things like the eraser pen, Nav Dial and other design factors.

Mark Orchant blogged nice things about the tablet at ZDNet (disclosure, I am on the advisory board of Foldera, where Mark is the VP of Marketing).

And the product received an "Editor's Choice" designation from PC Magazine. 

David Churbuck

Here at Design Matters there are a just a few design blogs we admire. I thought I'd show some link love:

1. We Make Money Not Art: Regine Debatty's blog.
2. History of the Button: On. Off. Snooze. This blog is about buttons. The kind you push, not the kind on your shirt.
3. Hi-iD: You don't need to read it to love it.
4. Dexigner: Beautifully designed, a treasure trove of news about design.
5. Inhabitat: Interior design and architecture.
6. Soode!: I can't read it, but the images are fantastic.

[one aside, nearly all of these blogs are running Wordpress. What does that say about the relationship between the code and the fact that designers are drawn to Wordpress? We first heard about Wordpress in the fall of 2004 when Om Malik told us to use it. We've been in love ever since, especially with the incredible design flexibility available in its themes.]

David Churbuck

One of the great things about working for Lenovo is the opportunity to work on so many unique design projects. Who would have thought we would be doing the design of a window display showcasing ThinkPad on Madison Avenue. Well we did. Susan Moffatt,  one of the designers who works for me,  led this project. Quite a different view from her former experiences designing everything from mainframes to personal computers. Here is a short amateur video shot by Susan  showing the design. I love the street sounds and handheld quality of the video clip. Enjoy.

David Hill